Mr. Speaker, my learned friend from Haldimand—Norfolk's speech was terrific. She is a very tough act to follow.
When I read the bill for the first time, my jaw hit the floor. As I have previously discussed in the House, my motivation for signing up to become a politician was the violation of basic charter rights that the Liberals perpetrated in the last Parliament. Even with that background in mind, I had thought and hoped that they had perhaps been chastened and that they would not try so hard to claim unto themselves, in the current Parliament, powers explicitly forbidden by our Constitution, but I was wrong.
Before I start talking about the bill today, let me just say that it has been shocking to listen to Liberals claim to defend charter rights, when they themselves violated section 2 and section 8 of our charter when they imposed the Emergencies Act. That was determined by Justice Mosley of the federal court. All the Liberal members in the last Parliament voted to do that, and I do not want to hear any more about defending charter rights from any such member who has not apologized for that violation.
As for the present bill, I am concerned by the following clauses. Clause 15.1 and clause 15.2 would give the minister the unprecedented, incredible power to kick any private Canadian citizen off the Internet, to cut off their phone line and to turn off their cell phone. That is the plain-language summary but I will quote now the bill in its legalese:
If there are reasonable grounds to believe that it is necessary to do so to secure the Canadian telecommunications system against any threat...the Minister may...
prohibit a telecommunications service provider from providing any service to [the] specified person.
Perhaps this might make sense to do in an extreme circumstance, if a person is trying to cause our satellites to crash or to jam military radar, but the clause does not use language about extreme threats of physical damage or threats to national security. It says “any threat”.
As far as I can tell, given the Liberals' incautious and bombastic use of terms like “misinformation”, that being any information they do not like, or “existential threat”, for instance when the hon. member for Burlington North—Milton West called the leader of my party an “existential threat to our democracy”, which is, of course, bananas, it seems to me that the industry minister could deem any speech they do not like “any threat”, and then kick that person off the Internet. The clause reaches Chinese Communist Party levels of government overreach, and the Liberals should be ashamed of themselves.
The bill gets worse; it does not get better. Subclause 15.2(5) would give the minister the ability to make secret the decision to kick someone off the Internet. Imagine that: Someone has annoyed the Liberal Party overlords, and the Liberal Party overlords have decided to kick the person off the Internet and cut their phone line. This person cannot tell anyone that they have been cut off. I have no idea how this could even possibly be enforced, but imagine being put, effectively, into a digital gulag, unable to use the phone, the Internet or one's online banking, and if the person tells anyone that this happened, they could go to physical jail.
I do not doubt that the Liberals will stand and say that I am being somehow outlandish in my interpretation of this. I am not; it is there in black and white. Let me quote it for them. It seems as though they have not read it: “An order made under subsection (1) or (2) may also include a provision prohibiting the disclosure of its existence, or some or all of its contents, by any person.” If members are not inclined to believe me, they can Google “Bill C-8” and “Canadian Constitution Foundation”. There they will find its publication from October 1, 2025, where its expert lawyers corroborate my concerns.
I am sorry to say that the bill continues to get worse; it does not get better. Clause 15.4 says, “The Minister may require any person to provide...within any time...any information that [would help her make a decision] under section 15.1 or 15.2”.
It seems to me that if the legislation passes in its current, unamended form, the Minister of Industry could wake up one morning and decide that any of us or any other private citizen may be, possibly, as she is not quite sure, some sort of threat to our telecommunications system. With no warrant, no trial and no automatic judicial review, she could compel Rogers or Telus to give her that citizen's address book, their Internet search history or their browser history.
This is unreasonable, and it is shocking. This is the Liberal Party under its new Prime Minister. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In my first speech to the House, I beseeched the new Prime Minister to discard this darkness and turn toward the light. By reintroducing the Trudeau legislation, he has failed to make the turn.
It is not just me raising these concerns. The Liberals tried to ram the bill through the last Parliament. Multiple civil society groups wrote an open letter to former minister Marco Mendicino, alerting him to the problems. Signatories to the letter include the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, Ligue des droits et libertés, OpenMedia and the Privacy and Access Council of Canada.
Here is a quote from a summary of that letter: “Bill C-26 grants the government sweeping new powers not only over vast swathes of the Canadian economy, but also to intrude on the private lives of Canadians.”
Here is another quote: “Time and again, we’ve seen federal governments try to grant themselves the power to intrude on our private lives in the name of ‘security’ — and time and again, people in Canada have come together to push back.”
The summary of the letter also says that the bill “lacks guardrails to constrain abuse”, “permits unknowable orders to trump public regulation”, “authorizes the use of secret evidence in Court”, “grants power without accountability” and “lacks justification”; that is, the bill would not even fix the cybersecurity problems it purports to solve.
Do the Liberals believe that creeping authoritarianism worldwide and on this continent is a problem, or do they not? If they do, why have they written a bill with such authoritarian provisions? Why have they failed entirely to take the advice of these civil liberties groups?
Once again, the bill will go to committee. Once again, Conservatives will be called upon to do the Liberals' homework and repair the deeply flawed bill. The offending provisions that I have described would not make us any safer. The industry minister's turning off a private Canadian citizen's cellphone would do nothing to stop hackers in Russia, China and Iran from wreaking havoc on our telecommunications infrastructure. The Liberals cannot fix the problem, because they do not understand the problem. They do not even understand where the problem is coming from. In the relatively uncommon situation where the threat is indeed coming from a private Canadian citizen in his mother's basement, why would they cut off his Rogers account? We can get a warrant, arrest him, have a trial in open court and put him in jail.
It is the Conservatives who care about and understand cybersecurity. People with even a passing familiarity of the day's news will recall that Conservatives called to ban Huawei from our 5G networks for three years before the members on the opposite side deigned to take that threat seriously.
We will salvage what is good out of the bill, and we are happy to do that work for the good of Canadians, but this cleanup job should not be necessary. If the Liberals would merely live up to their apparently insincere reverence for our charter rights, we would not even need to have this conversation.
